readily that Harvard graduates, taking one with another, deserve
to be ranked as first-rate men, and on the other hand he greatly
overestimates the number of first-rate men needed to run the world,
and to insure a reasonable rate of human progress. The fact is that
the safeguarding and development of civilization are and always have
been in the exclusive care of a very small minority of human beings
of each generation, and that the rest of the human race consists
wholly of deadheads. Consider, for example, the telephone, a very
characteristic agent of Christian advancement. It has been invented,
perfected, organized and brought to every door in our own time by less
than 20 men--nay, by less than 10 men. All the others who have made
it, financed and installed it have been simply trailers. All the rest
of the human race has taken a free ride. The number of such first-rate
men in the world is always overestimated, and it is fatuously assumed
that they are identical with the wealthier minority of the population.
Prof. Dr. McDougall himself falls into this last error. He proves--what
everyone knew already--that the children of well-to-do parents are
brighter, by pedagogical standards, than the children of poor folk, but
this fact is of no significance. If it were, then pedagogues themselves
would rank as first-rate men, which is an absurdity; they are, in
fact, generally stupid, and seldom produce anything of value to the
world. The test of a first-rate man is not to be made by the criteria
of schoolmarms. It is to be made by asking the simple question: Has
he ever said or done anything that was not said or done before, and
is it something of positive and permanent value to the human race? If
the answer is yes, then he belongs to the superior minority; if it
is no, then he belongs to the mob, no matter how brilliantly he may
pass examinations, and no matter how greatly he may prosper under the
civilization that his superiors have fostered and developed.
The number of men who can pass this test is always extremely
small--vastly smaller than the uncritical worshipers of politicians,
university presidents, prima donna theologians, opera singers, lawyers,
popular philosophers, successful authors and other such human Fords
usually assume. How many exist at the present moment in the United
States? I turn to “Who’s Who in America” and find 23,443 names. But
a brief inspection is sufficient to show that only a small minority
are borne by first-rate men. I run over page after page and find
nothing but Fords--an army general who has done absolutely nothing
save obey orders and draw his pay, three authors of the eighth rate,
five or six pedagogues, a theologian or two, a Federal judge--who
ever heard of a Federal judge who left the world more intelligent,
more virtuous or more efficient than he found it?--a publisher of
bad books, two Congressmen, a bishop. I begin to despair. Finally,
I find a first-rate man: Bush of the Bush Terminals. One in 35.
The proportion, I think, is fair for the whole book. This makes
670 first-rate Americans in our time. Call it 700 to be safe. But
race-suicide among the upper classes will make it impossible to produce
even the 700 in the next generation? Nonsense! It is not necessary
that _every_ first-rate man leave children behind him; it is only
necessary that a few of them in each generation do so. Nature will do
the rest. The first-rate character may be concealed for a generation
or two, but soon or late it will reveal itself, and sometimes in many
individuals. This explains the common notion that first-rate men are
often produced in low life, _e. g._, the case of Lincoln. They are, but
not by low-lifers. Here the devil helps the angels, and the sinfulness
of man takes on a high human utility. Often the cross is concealed
in forgotten generations. The good blood is apparently lost in the
flood of proletarian bilge--but suddenly it begins to run red and
clear, and the platitudinarians have another up-from-slavery chapter
to wag their ears over. I believe fully that the first-rate men of
the world constitute a distinct and separate species--that they have
little, if anything, in common with the lower orders of men. But the
two races, fortunately for human progress, are mutually fertile. If
they ever cease to be, then God help us all! But there is absolutely
no sign that they are ceasing to be. So long as they remain as they
are there need be no worry about the future of civilization. The danger
is that first-rate men may grow too numerous, and so arouse the hatred
of the lower orders, as happened in Greece. The United States now
accommodates 700. If the number rose to 1000 I fear that the churches,
the newspapers, Congress and the American Legion would grow restless,
and that the catastrophe dreamed of by Prof. McDougall would begin to
cast its shadows before.
Meanwhile, all the current pulling of long faces is absurd. There is
not the slightest sign that the basic elements of modern civilization,
such as it is, are in any danger, proximately or remotely. Europe, at
the moment, is a bit weary, but no actual barbarians are thundering
at the gate; all the recognizable barbarians, in fact, are retreating
sadly into their native jungles, with troubles of their own. There is
no decline in Christian _morale_; if anything, there is far too much
Christian _morale_ on tap. The one thing that one may say accurately is
that there is a struggle for control within the borders of civilization
itself, to wit, between the masses of simple and stupid men and various
minorities of extremely egoistic and determined men. But neither side
is trying to destroy civilization, save in the indignant visions of
the other. On the contrary, both are trying their best to preserve it,
and whether one side wins or the other it will be duly preserved. Ten
years hence it will be just as easy to send a picture postcard or to
be beaten by a policeman as it is to-day, and wherever one may buy a
picture postcard the arts are safe and wherever one may be beaten by a
policeman law and order are safe, and when the arts and law and order
are safe, then civilization is also safe. False analogies are at the
bottom of most of the current fears--that is, when they are honest.
The analogy with Rome, so often cited, is especially nonsensical. A
few hundred thousand Romans were surrounded by countless millions of
barbarians, and the barbarians had arms quite as good as those of the
Romans. Where is any similar horde to be found today? Are the Japs
dangerous? Plainly not, save perhaps to the United States. The Japs,
with all of the odds on their side, took more than two years to beat
the Russians; they would stand up before a European coalition no more
than 10 days. The Chinese? They don’t want Europe; they want only
China. The blacks of Africa? Two German divisions could dispose of
all of them, given a fair, stand-up battle, in two hours. Nor is any
genuine fear to be deduced from the fate of the late Confederacy in
America. The intellectual collapse of the Southern States after the
Civil War was purely a local and geographical matter. Most of the
surviving Southerners who had been civilized before the war simply
moved North, leaving only a few cripples, the darkeys and a mob of poor
white trash behind. But civilization in the United States was certainly
not affected; in fact, the mixing of Southerners and Northerners in
the North probably improved it. Today, a half century afterward, even
some of the Southern poor whites are becoming relatively civilized. A
book store has been opened in New Orleans, a man in Mobile has bought
a violoncello, and only the other day, in Georgia, a white man was
actually taken by the constabulary for killing a dozen Negroes.
What the authors of elegies mistake for the collapse of civilization is
simply the internal struggle that I have mentioned--the ages-old combat
between the haves and the have-nots, now rendered transiently acute by
a parlous shortening of the things fought for. The ultimate issue of
that struggle seems to me to be plain enough. The have-nots will be
given a drubbing, and under the protection of a new and unprecedentedly
vigorous and daring capitalism the thing called Christian civilization
will be promoted as it has never been promoted before. My arteries
harden so fast--a consequence of my constant and quixotic sacrifice of
myself to the common weal--that I cannot hope to live into the full
flush of that new Golden Age, but I can at least smack my lips over it
in anticipation. What I see is a vast horde of inferior men broken,
after a hopeless, fruitless fight, to the hard, uninspiring labor of
the world--a race of slaves superbly regimented, and kept steadily
in order by great brigades of propagandists, official optimists,
scare-mongers, Great Thinkers and rev. clergy. And over them a minority
of capitalist overlords, well-fed, well-protected, highly respected,
politely envied, and lavishly supplied with endless stores of picture
postcards, gasoline, silk underwear, mayonnaise, Ponet Canet, toilet
soap and phonograph records.
The battle, in fact, is already half won. In France and the United
States capitalism can weather any conceivable storm. In England it
craftily encourages labor to a combat that will be to a finish, and
with capital on top. In Italy it is already in the saddle. In Germany
only the Junkers stave off the inevitable victory of money. In Russia
the Bolsheviks help capital everywhere by reducing the cause of the
have-nots to an absurdity. The other countries are not dogs, but mere
tails.... The United States, I believe, will see the thing brought to
its finest flower. There were no war losses here, but only profits.
In all other countries, the conscripts of the war are restless, and
inclined to move toward the Left. Here they are already superbly
organized to serve capital, and give the final touch of felicity to
the situation by serving it for nothing. On the evening of the same
day that an American Legionary has his wages reduced 40 per cent. and
his hours of labor increased 25 per cent., he goes out at his own risk
and expense and helps to tar and feather some visionary who tries to
convince him that he has been swindled. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court of
New York decides formally that “the courts ... must stand at all times
as the representatives of capital,” and the newspapers commend the
dictum in lavish terms.... I sing Utopia. It is about to burst upon us.
XIII. ON GOVERNMENT
1
“Government,” said William Godwin in that “Enquiry Concerning Political
Justice” which got Shelley two wives and lost him £6000 a year,
“can have no more than two legitimate purposes: the suppression of
injustice against individuals within the community, and the common
defense against external invasion.” The dictum, after a hundred and
thirty-one years, remains unimproved and perhaps unimprovable. Today,
to be sure, with Darwin behind us, we’d make some change in its terms:
what Godwin was trying to say, obviously, was that the central aim of
government was to ameliorate the struggle for existence--to cherish
and protect the dignity of man in the midst of the brutal strife of
_Homo neanderthalensis_. But that change would be simply substituting a
_cliché_ of the Nineteenth Century for one of the Eighteenth. All the
furious discussion of the subject that has gone on in the intervening
time has not changed the basic idea in the slightest. To the plain man
of today, as to the most fanatical Liberal or Socialist, government
appears primarily as a device for compensating his weakness, a machine
for protecting him in rights that he could not make secure with his
own arm. Even the Tory holds the same view of it: its essential
function, to him, is to safeguard his property against the lascivious
desires of those who, if they were not policed, would be tempted to
grab it. “Government,” said George Washington, “is not reason, it is
not eloquence--it is force.” Bad government is that which is weak,
irresolute and lacking in constabulary enterprise; when one has
defined it, one has also defined a bad bishop, cavalry captain or
policeman. Good government is that which delivers the citizen from
the risk of being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily
and violently--one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric
business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more
dignified and more agreeable undertakings, to his own content and
profit, and the advantage, it may be, of the commonwealth.
Unfortunately, this function is performed only imperfectly by any of
the forms of government now visible in Christendom, and Dr. Johnson was
perhaps justified in dismissing them all as but various aspects of the
same fraud. The citizen of today, even in the most civilized states,
is not only secured but defectively against other citizens who aspire
to exploit and injure him--for example, highwaymen, bankers, quack
doctors, clergymen, sellers of oil stock and contaminated liquor, and
so-called reformers of all sorts,--and against external foes, military,
commercial and philosophical; he is also exploited and injured almost
without measure by the government itself--in other words, by the very
agency which professes to protect him. That agency becomes, indeed,
one of the most dangerous and insatiable of the inimical forces
present in his everyday environment. He finds it more difficult and
costly to survive in the face of it than it is to survive in the
face of any other enemy. He may, if he has prudence, guard himself
effectively against all the known varieties of private criminals, from
stockbrokers to pickpockets and from lawyers to kidnapers, and he
may, if he has been burnt enough, learn to guard himself also against
the rogues who seek to rob him by the subtler device of playing upon
his sentimentalities and superstitions: charity mongers, idealists,
soul-savers, and others after their kind. But he can no more escape the
tax-gatherer and the policemen, in all their protean and multitudinous
guises, than he can escape the ultimate mortician. They beset him
constantly, day in and day out, in ever-increasing numbers and in ever
more disarming masks and attitudes. They invade his liberty, affront
his dignity and greatly incommode his search for happiness, and every
year they demand and wrest from him a larger and larger share of his
worldly goods. The average American of today works more than a full
day in every week to support his government. It already costs him more
than his pleasures and almost as much as his vices, and in another half
century, no doubt, it will begin to cost as much as his necessities.
These gross extortions and tyrannies, of course, are all practised on
the theory that they are not only unavoidable, but also laudable--that
government oppresses its victims in order to confer upon them the
great boons mentioned by Godwin. But that theory, I believe, begins to
be quite as dishonest as the chiropractor’s pretense that he pummels
his patient’s spine in order to cure his cancer: the actual object,
obviously, is simply to cure his solvency. What keeps such notions
in full credit, and safeguards them against destructive analysis, is
chiefly the survival into our enlightened age of a concept hatched in
the black days of absolutism--the concept, to wit, that government is
something that is superior to and quite distinct from all other human
institutions--that it is, in its essence, not a mere organization
of ordinary men, like the Ku Klux Klan, the United States Steel
Corporation or Columbia University, but a transcendental organism
composed of aloof and impersonal powers, devoid wholly of self-interest
and not to be measured by merely human standards. One hears it spoken
of, not uncommonly, as one hears the law of gravitation and the grace
of God spoken of--as if its acts had no human motive in them and stood
clearly above human fallibility. This concept, I need not argue, is
full of error. The government at Washington is no more impersonal than
the cloak and suit business is impersonal. It is operated by precisely
the same sort of men, and to almost the same ends. When we say that it
has decided to do this or that, that it proposes or aspires to do this
or that--usually to the great cost and inconvenience of nine-tenths of
us--we simply say that a definite man or group of men has decided to
do it, or proposes or aspires to do it; and when we examine this group
of men realistically we almost invariably find that it is composed
of individuals who are not only not superior to the general, but
plainly and depressingly inferior, both in common sense and in common
decency--that the act of government we are called upon to ratify and
submit to is, in its essence, no more than an act of self-interest by
men who, if no mythical authority stood behind them, would have a hard
time of it surviving in the struggle for existence.
2
These men, in point of fact, are seldom if ever moved by anything
rationally describable as public spirit; there is actually no more
public spirit among them than among so many burglars or street-walkers.
Their purpose, first, last and all the time, is to promote their
private advantage, and to that end, and that end alone, they exercise
all the vast powers that are in their hands. Sometimes the thing they
want is mere security in their jobs; sometimes they want gaudier and
more lucrative jobs; sometimes they are content with their jobs and
their pay but yearn for more power. Whatever it is they seek, whether
security, greater ease, more money or more power, it has to come out
of the common stock, and so it diminishes the shares of all other
men. Putting a new job-holder to work decreases the wages of every
wage-earner in the land--not enough to be noticed, perhaps, but enough
to leave its mark. Giving a job-holder more power takes something
away from the liberty of all of us: we are less free than we were in
proportion as he has more authority. Theoretically, we get something
for what we thus give up, but actually we usually get absolutely
nothing. Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of
Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator
tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and
the salaries of their parasites? It may be plausibly argued, of course,
that the House itself is necessary to our happiness and salvation--that
we need it as we need trolley conductors, chiropodists and the men who
bite off puppies’ tails. But even if that be granted--and I, for one,
am by no means disposed to grant it--the plain fact remains that all
the useful work the House does might be done just as well by fifty men,
and that the rest are of no more utility to the commonwealth, in any
rational sense, than so many tight-rope walkers or teachers of mah jong.
The Fathers, when they launched the Republic, were under no illusions
as to the nature of government. Washington’s view of its inner
nature I have already quoted; Jefferson it was who said sagely that
“that government is best which governs least.” The Constitution in
its first form, perhaps, was designed chiefly to check the rising
pretensions of the lower orders, drunk with the democratic fustian of
the Revolutionary era, but when the Bill of Rights was added to it its
guns began to point more especially at the government itself, _i. e._,
at the class of job-holders, ever bent upon oppressing the citizen
to the limit of his endurance. It is, perhaps, a fact provocative
of sour mirth that the Bill of Rights was designed trustfully to
prohibit forever two of the favorite crimes of all known governments:
the seizure of private property without adequate compensation and the
invasion of the citizen’s liberty without justifiable cause and due
process of law. It is a fact provocative of mirth yet more sour that
the execution of these prohibitions was put into the hands of courts,
which is to say, into the hands of lawyers, which is to say, into
the hands of men specifically educated to discover legal excuses for
dishonest, dishonorable and anti-social acts. The actual history of
the Constitution, as everyone knows, has been a history of the gradual
abandonment of all such impediments to governmental tyranny. Today we
live frankly under a government of men, not of laws. What is the Bill
of Rights to a Roosevelt, a Wilson, a Palmer, a Daugherty, a Burns?
Under such tin-horn Cæsars the essential enmity between government and
citizen becomes only too plain, and one gets all the proof that is
needed of the eternal impossibility of protecting the latter against
the former. The government can not only evoke fear in its victims; it
can also evoke a sort of superstitious reverence. It is thus both an
army and a church, and with sharp weapons in both hands it is virtually
irresistible. Its personnel, true enough, may be changed, and so may
the external forms of the fraud it practises, but its inner nature is
immutable.
Politics, as hopeful men practise it in the world, consists mainly
of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance. The
American colonists, when they got rid of the Potsdam tyrant, believed
fondly that they were getting rid of oppressive taxes forever and
setting up complete liberty. They found almost instantly that taxes
were higher than ever, and before many years they were writhing under
the Alien and Sedition Acts. The French, when they threw off the
monarchy at last, looked forward to a Golden Age of peace, plenty and
freedom. They are now wrecked by war, bankrupted beyond any chance
of recovery, and hag-ridden by an apparently unbreakable combination
of the most corrupt and cynical politicians ever seen in the world.
The experience of the Russians and Germans is even more eloquent.
The former have been ruined by their saviors, and in so far as they
have any power of reflection left, long for the restoration of the
tyranny they once ascribed to the devil. The latter, delivered from the
Hohenzollerns, now find the Schmidts and Krauses ten times as expensive
and oppressive. Six months after the republic was set up a German
cabinet minister, for the first time in the history of the nation,
was in flight over the border, his loot under his arm. In the first
flush of surprise and indignation the people took to assassinating
politicians, but before long they gave it up as hopeless: Schmidt fell
but Kraus still lived, and so government kept its vitality and its
character. Many Germans, reduced to despair, now advocate a complete
abolition of political government; if Stinnes had lived they would have
tried to make him dictator of the country. But political government,
_i. e._, government by professional job-holders, would have remained
in fact, despite its theoretical abolition, and its nature would have
been unchanged.
If downright revolution is thus incapable of curing the disease,
the ordinary reforms that men believe in sink to the level of bald
quackeries. Consider, for example, the history of so-called Civil
Service Reform in the United States. It came in on a wave of intense
public indignation against the whole governmental imposture; it
represented a violent and romantic effort to substitute an ideal of
public service for the familiar harsh reality of public exploitation.
For fifty years the American people had sweated and suffered under the
spoils system, that lovely legacy of the “reforms” of the Jackson era.
By the opening of the eighties they were ready to dispose of it by fair
means or foul. The job-holder, once theoretically a freeman discharging
a lofty and necessary duty, was seen clearly to be no more than a rat
devouring the communal corn; his public position was indistinguishable
from that of a child-stealer, a well-poisoner or a Sunday-school
superintendent; and that of his brother, the government contractor
and purveyor, was even lower. Many men of both classes, including
some very important ones, were clapped into jail, and many others had
to depart for Canada between days, along with the nightly squad of
clerical seducers and absconding bank cashiers. Thereupon seers and
prophets arose to lead the people out of the wilderness. A few wild
ones proposed, in effect, that government be abolished altogether,
but the notion outraged democratic sentiment, and so most of them
followed the job-holders into jail; some, in fact, were put to death
by more or less due process of law. The majority of soothsayers were
less revolutionary: they proposed only that the race of job-holders be
reformed by force, that government be purged and denaturized.